Don’t Defend The Scowl

Project Runway’s Tim Gunn gave one of my favorite interviews ever to the lovely Mo Ryan at the Chicago Tribune. In it, Tim finally answers the questions many of us had about what the hell he and Heidi were talking about at the reunion show, when they mentioned how angry Victorya was about Jack going home sick:

Victorya in particular was so hysterical with me and with the producers, [saying] ‘What are you doing to him? He should stay.’ It’s like, ‘You know something, he should be in the hospital right now. Stop it, and stop being so selfish.’”

Tim has a few more things to say as well, including this little gem that I particularly enjoyed:

She said, ‘I never dreamed the experience of being on the show would be like this.’ We said, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I never dreamed we’d only have a day for challenges, that we wouldn’t have any breaks.’ ‘But you said you saw the show.’ She said, ‘I assumed it was cheated.’ I said, ‘Then you only have your own delusions to blame.’ She was really angry and bitter.

There’s been a lot of discussion floating around about whether Tim was unprofessional in making these comments, and he certainly hit a nerve, considering that Victorya offered Blogging Project Runway a response that has almost nothing to do with anything Tim said about her, but instead attacks his very credentials for being on the show:

It’s no secret that it’s been extremely hard for me to take any of Tim’s advice to heart, chiefly because I don’t think he is qualified to give it. Tim was, for many years, the dean of Parsons,which is a fancy word for administrator. Does that automatically give him the credentials to assume the role of an arbiter of fashion? I can see how he might be capable of teaching say, fashion history, but design?

Victorya has not learned the lesson that when you go for the throat and bypass the point, you automatically lose the argument. Did what he described not happen? She does not say. Did she not accuse the show of cheating to favor certain contestants, as he says she did in another part of his interview? She does not say.

I tend to side with those who believe that Tim’s interview is not only appropriate, but completely wonderful, because this is why Tim is effective: he is human, and he has opinions. His disgust at Chris March’s use of human hair was actually a little exaggerated, I thought — I understood the cringe, but I certainly didn’t think it was that big a deal. Women flap long hair around all day long. Nevertheless, I would never have wanted anything but Tim’s genuine reaction.

The fact that Tim says he can’t stand Victorya is how I know he means it when he speaks of his love of Laura Bennett or his regard for Jeffrey Sebelia (which, again, I do not share), and it’s why his near-feud with Jay McCarroll is interesting to me. If I believed that he was a good liar, or if I believed that he wouldn’t tell me the truth if somebody were a holy terror on the set, he’d lose a good part of his charm.

The Art Of Less Noise

I spent yesterday at the Met, looking for a little peace of mind. It was stunningly peaceful, really; so little noise, so many people paying attention to things that aren’t moving, flickering, or talking back to them. I decided to rent the audio guide, figuring with little optimism that I’d make an effort to understand the art. This turned out to be a great decision. I wasn’t sure whether the audio explanations would be condescending or impenetrable, but I figured they’d be one or the other. They aren’t. The Met has done a great job including everything from an eye surgeon explaining what kind of eye surgery might explain the appearance of a young man in a mummy painting to museum staff talking about the care and feeding of particular pieces.

I concluded that the security guard in charge of this enormous stone box (I believe you’re buried in it, as is the case with so much of the Egyptian art) has the worst job at the Met. You can see how it’s not roped off or anything, and that’s the bare carved stone, right out there where people can walk up and touch it. During the time I watched the poor guy (not visible in the picture because he’s behind the lid, sort of), I think about every other person who approached the piece had to be curtly told, “Please don’t touch the art.”

Nobody means to — it invites you to peek inside, so people forget they shouldn’t walk up and put their hands on the edge. If Met employees competed to see who yells at the most people in a day, the only guy who could compete with this guy would be the guy who tells people they can’t take pictures (even without flash, which is the rule in most of the museum) of the real shark preserved in formaldehyde that floats in a huge box up with the modern art.

For obvious reasons, I cannot show you a picture of the shark.

Isn’t this cute? Yes, that’s right. I am declaring this ancient piece of work “cute.” My first thought when I saw it was that you wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if I told you they were selling this at Ikea, or that I’d seen it at Apartment Therapy. One of the things I loved about the oldest things in the place was looking at how little has changed. Most of the jewelry is similar to styles you could see now. We’ve invented so much less than we think we have, where “we” are “people who are alive at any given moment.”

And obviously, we didn’t invent dumb, or grief, or lust, or graphic depictions of lust — I saw a Poussin painting of a woman discovered by two satyrs in the woods while in the act of getting herself off, which sort of surprised me in its bluntness. He lived from 1594 to 1665; I didn’t know that respectable artists with wealthy patrons would paint a nude woman with the hand and everything. I don’t have a picture of it myself (no photography in the Poussin exhibit), but it’s a variation on this piece that apparently lives at the National Gallery in London. Charmingly, the Gallery’s description describes her merely as a “sleeping nymph.” She ain’t sleeping, fellas. (And no, I don’t have a dirty mind — as if you couldn’t see for yourself, the audio guide to the piece at the Met, as well as other discussions of this piece, are much more forthcoming…so to speak.)

Before departing the fact that I am twelve, how can it be that nobody in the description of this particular sculpture is acknowledging the rather territorial grasp of the larger figure on the smaller one? I kept expecting some explanation, and the description is just sort of, “Two figures. One is taller. Let’s move on.” I think this gentleman is going to get a visit from HR about how to behave at the Christmas party.

It’s really amazing how well some of this stuff is preserved, and deeply weird in some cases to ponder how old it is. I will tell you this: it will make you feel small. If there’s one thing this trip was wonderful for, it was perspective. You know what I learned? Even the incredibly powerful people in these societies, all they really got for being so powerful, in the long run, was that they were buried in fancier boxes. People who did something real, people who made art, their work survives, but all you get for having worked your way up the ladder, even all the way to being king, is that your corpse can spend eternity standing guard over all the beautiful and special things you could never have made yourself that you managed to have buried with you.

Food for thought, is all.

Okay, this was hilarious. I saw this while wandering among the medieval sculpture, and I thought, “I am going to send a picture of this piece to my friend Stephen, who has the same hair as this guy. And I’m going to say, ‘Hey, this looks just like you!’” So I wandered over and took the lens cap off and looked down at the plaque with the title of the piece.

Which is “Saint Stephen.”

Unfortunately, the name didn’t come out on the pictures — the lack of flash made all these pictures very challenging and really tested my steady-hand skills — but I give you my word, the title of this is “Saint Stephen.”

(Aha! See him here.)

I found myself wondering whether it was all right for me to conclude that some of the frou-frou French “decorative art” was tacky. Because I don’t care how meticulously made this is; it still has adorable cherubs on it. Which makes it Precious Moments, to me, no matter how hard I try to see beauty. It’s a little overwhelming, because this piece is in a whole room where everything is this color — the other ceramics, some other items, and most definitely the walls. It’s all this same blue, and it’s followed by a similar room in pink. As I was wandering around the museum trying to find my way back to where I was trying to go and retrace my steps, I kept thinking, “Have to get back to the foofy French rooms, have to get back to the foofy French rooms.” I am destined never to be a sophisticate.

This might be my favorite thing I saw all day. It’s in a room full of much more conventional stuff in the Robert Lehman Collection, which is one of the funniest parts of the Met, in my opinion. It’s a great collection, don’t get me wrong, but it’s sort of Art You’ve Heard Of That’s Not Too Hard, for the most part. Van Gogh, Renoir, Seurat, Monet, Matisse, et cetera. You can look at it as a sampler, but you can also look at it as a gift for tourists who want to say they saw art but don’t want to wander past…you know, the shark preserved in formaldehyde. That’s not why it’s funny, though. It’s funny because they have carefully positioned it across from the cafeteria. To me, the message feels like, “If you are giving up on the museum because you are confused, and if you have stopped in for some lunch before you quit entirely, we will now serve you all the Great Art you thought you were coming here to see — all at once!”

At any rate, this is by Giovanni di Paolo, and it’s called “The Creation Of The World And The Expulsion From Paradise,” and the reason I love it is that it was done in 1445, and nothing else from that period quite looks like this. That big circle? Where is that coming from? The audio guide explained to me that the circle has a map in the middle, then rings for air, water, and fire (I think), then rings for each planet, and then the ring with the zodiac symbols, and then the ring that separates us from the divine. But really, what makes it so remarkable is just the appearance of this geometrical thing that looks utterly out of place. Which is what the audio guide said! And I had thought of it myself! I am so proud.

This just killed me. It shows the arrest of Jesus, including the actual Judas kiss. Thanks to the audio guide, I looked carefully enough to see that Judas and Jesus have been given precisely the same face by the artist, which is particularly interesting because this is a choral screen, meant for the front of a church, meaning that nobody would really ever see the face of Judas (who’s facing away from us). Sort of an artist’s moment meant primarily for himself. Also very unlikely to be noticed? As Jesus is being arrested, you can see his hand reach around the back of the seated figure (Malchus) whose ear has just been cut off by Simon Peter and is being healed by Jesus. The act of healing the ear of one of his pursuers is one of those little details that makes the Bible sort of a compelling book, and as the audio guide (thanks, audio guide!) points out, it’s a lovely juxtaposition of pain and forgiveness.

I could do this all day, but I’m going to leave off with this, precisely the kind of elaborate painting I often haven’t been able to penetrate in the past. This particular one, “Samson Captured By The Philistines,” is enormously affecting in person. That’s Samson with his back to you, being captured after his betrayal by Delilah. There tends to be so much emphasis on faces that it’s kind of remarkable how much is accomplished here, as far as showing Samson’s absolute state of torment, with primarily his back and legs.

I was really struck by how many things I saw that were based around two themes: (1) a group of people tormenting or pursuing someone; and (2) a group of people grieving over someone. Obviously, this is partly because of the prominence of these themes in the Bible — Jesus was pursued and set upon; later, he was mourned, as were (so the art says) all the great kings. There are many, many “Lamentation” pieces, showing people bent over the body of Jesus after he was crucified, and in many cases, they’re almost difficult to look at, they’re so evocative. Nothing communicates grief quite like art, is one of the things I took away from yesterday.

[If you absolutely cannot get enough pictures from the Met, the expanded photo set is at Flickr.]